[R-G] Obama and Afghanistan

[Anthony Fenton]

August 6, 2008
More of the Same, Packaged as Change
Barack Obama and Afghanistan

By MARC HEROLD

http://counterpunch.org/herold08062008.html

     When asked in Berlin by CNN’s Candy Crowley whether he believed  
the United States needed to apologize for anything over the past 7 ½  
years in terms of foreign policy, candidate Obama responded, “No, I  
don’t believe in the U.S. apologizing. As I said I think the war in  
Iraq was a mistake…”

So what does our contemporary “charmer of change,” Barack Obama,  
propose regarding Afghanistan?

In mid-December 2006, a charter member of the U.S. defense  
intellectual establishment and enthusiast of precision bombing,  
Anthony Cordesman, fellow at the Center for Strategic and  
International Studies, advanced a set of proposals which would  
allegedly allow the U.S. to win the war in Afghanistan. The essence  
involves: far greater amounts of military and economic “aid’; the  
economic aid must be managed from the outside; the aid should focus  
upon projects like roads, water and to a lesser degree, schools and  
medical services; NATO allies especially slackers like France,  
Germany, Italy and Spain need to increase aid to Afghanistan;  U.S.  
military forces are too small “to do the job” because of competing  
demands from Iraq and, hence, again those same NATO allies must  
provide larger, stronger and better-equipped forces to engage in  
combat (without political constraints); and as in Iraq, emphasis needs  
to be upon proper training of Afghan army and police forces. Cordesman  
wants the U.S. to furnish an additional $5.9 billion during the  
current fiscal year. In effect, Cordesman proposes nothing which has  
not long ago been suggested (even back in the days of Vietnam where  
the official clamor was for more “aid” and Vietnamizing the fighting).

Candidate Obama appears to have adopted wholesale what Cordesman was  
proposing about two year ago with one qualification: Obama recognizes  
that the U.S’s traditional European NATO allies will not provide large  
numbers of additional fighting forces, hence Obama proposes rotating  
three divisions or about 10,000 U.S. troops out of Iraq and into  
Afghanistan.

If we examine candidate Obama’s most important prepared foreign policy  
speech to-date, that given on July 14, 2008, we find the elements of  
what as president he might do in Afghanistan.   He forthrightly casts  
his interest in Afghanistan purely in terms of “making America safer”:

     I will focus this strategy on five goals essential to making  
America safer: ending the war in Iraq responsibly; finishing the fight  
against Al Qaeda and the Taliban; securing all nuclear weapons and  
materials from terrorists and rogue states; achieving true energy  
security; and rebuilding our alliances to meet the challenges of the  
21st century.

In other words, Obama is committed to “finishing the fight against Al  
Qaeda and the Taliban,” translated as the fight against “Muslim  
extremism.”  Notwithstanding that this examplifies a worst case  
example of fallacious sunk-cost reasoning, George W. Bush and  
candidate McCain would not disagree.  He continues

     Our troops and our NATO allies are performing heroically in  
Afghanistan, but I have argued for years that we lack the resources to  
finish the job because of our commitment to Iraq. That's what the  
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said earlier this month. And  
that's why, as President, I will make the fight against Al Qaeda and  
the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we  
have to win…. We need more troops, more helicopters, more satellites,  
and more Predator drones in the Afghan border region. And we must make  
it clear that if Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out  
high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our  
sights. …Make no mistake: we can’t succeed in Afghanistan or secure  
our homeland unless we change our Pakistan policy. We must expect more  
of the Pakistani government, but we must offer more than a blank check  
to a General who has lost the confidence of his people.

Resources need to be focused upon Afghanistan because it “is the war  
we have to win.”  In July 2008, the International Herald Tribune  
called it “the war of necessity against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.” Why?  
Candidate Obama points to Taliban controlling parts of Afghanistan and  
Al Qaeda possessing an “expanding base in Pakistan.” These are alleged  
to be spawning grounds of “another attack on our homeland.” George W.  
Bush and candidate McCain would concur in being in error.

Very solid reasons now exist why Al Qaeda is not interested in  
mounting Palestinian-style attacks in America. Any attack would have  
to be bigger than 9/11. As the ever-prescient Mike Scheuer writes,

     Al-Qaeda does not want to fight the United States for any longer  
than is needed to drive it as far as possible out of the Middle East,  
and its doctrine for so doing has, in Osama bin Laden's formulation,  
three components: (a) bleed America to bankruptcy; (b) spread out U.S.  
forces to the greatest extent possible; and (c) promote Vietnam-era- 
like domestic disunity. Based on this doctrine, al-Qaeda leaders have  
decided that attacks in the United States are only worthwhile if they  
have maximum and simultaneous impact in three areas: high and enduring  
economic costs, severe casualties, and lasting negative psychological  
impact.

In fact, all three of bin Laden’s components have been realized –  
casualties, costs, and domestic disunity – all without a follow-up to  
the 9/11 attack.

And how will this victory over radical Islam be accomplished? Obama’s  
recipe for success involves:

           o Sending 2-3 combat brigades (each of 3-5,000 troops) to  
Afghanistan;
           o Pressure NATO allies to follow suit;
           o More use of drones, aircraft, etc. ;
           o Training Afghan “security” forces;
           o Supporting an Afghan judiciary;
           o Proposing an additional $1 billion in non-military  
assistance each year with safeguards to see no corruption and  
resources flowing to areas other than Kabul;
           o Invest in alternative livelihoods to poppies;
           o Pressure Pakistan to carry the fight into its tribal  
areas and reward it for so doing with military and non-military aid;
           o Should Pakistan fail to act in the tribal areas, the  
United States under Obama would act unilaterally;

New? Change? President George W. Bush and candidate McCain have long  
signed on to exactly these policies.  Certainly both would also see  
Afghanistan primarily through the lens of “making America safer.”  
George Bush Sr. did just that during 1988-1990 when America was  
presumed safer once the Soviets were out of Afghanistan. Then, he cut  
and ran.

Candidate Obama adopts the Pentagon’s military solution – defeating Al  
Qaeda and the Taliban – without paying much attention to either what  
gave rise to these groups or to the complexity of tribal society on  
the Afghan-Pakistan border. Even more importantly, he fails to  
acknowledge that the current bombing, night-time assaults upon  
villages, hooding and abducting suspects, kicking down doors and  
entering women’s quarters, etc. is forging an unlimited supply of  
recruits to the resistance. No, all we hear is “Our troops and our  
NATO allies are performing heroically in Afghanistan…” The complete  
failure to improve life for those living in rural southern, eastern  
and northeastern Afghanistan alongside unbridled corruption,  
profligiate wealth and Afghanistan’s current culture of official  
impunity further stokes the resistance. All we hear is a vague promise  
of $1 billion more aid per year.

As Patrick Buchanan points out candidate Obama has absolutely no exit  
strategy from Afghanistan, other than a presumed military victory. He  
utterly fails to understand the axoim of the guerrilla strategy: the  
guerrilla wins if he fails to lose. For the guerrilla it’s not about  
winning pitched battles, it’s about continuing the fight. The Taliban  
and associates have no difficulty with that: fighters from the Pashtun  
borderlands and monies from trhe Gulf States (and eslewhere).

Moreover, Buchanan continues

     And, using the old 10-to-one ratio of regular troops needed to  
defeat guerrillas, if the Taliban can recruit 1,000 new fighters, they  
can see Obama's two-brigade bet, and raise him. Just as Uncle Ho  
raised LBJ again and again. What does President Obama do then? Send in  
10,000 more?*

The aim of shifting 2-3 U.S. combat brigades to Afghanistan, greatly  
increasing the use of drones in order to unleash the fire power of  
Hellfire missiles or the “guided” bombs of B1-B’s, letting U.S.  
Special Forces and Navy Seals Teams loose to sow mayhem in the border  
regions on both sides of the Durand Line merely serves to continue the  
status-quo of death and destruction. Yet there are those like Ann  
Marlowe in the Wall Strert Journal who believe that the military  
solution in Afghanistan is to employ special forces to deal with the  
“bad guys” infiltrating from Pakistan. For her, “defeating the enemy  
is best accomplished by hiughly trained fighters who travel light.”   
Does Ms. Marlowe who was thrice embedded with U.S. occupatyion forces  
in Afghanistan recall the Green Berets in Vietnam or the Soviet  
Spetsnaz  in Afghanistan?

For some four years, U.S. Special Forces had free reign in the Afghan  
province of Kunar. With what effct? Kunar today is one of  
Afghanistan’s most volatile provinces just as it was when the Soviets  
unleashed their elite Spetsnaz units there. Britain could not seal the  
border between the Irelands with 40,000 soldiers. The Soviets with  
120,000 troops under a unified command structure and three times as  
many Afghan  satrap soldiers could not quell the mujahideen  
resistance. Candidate Obama advocates a policy of escalation simply in  
order not to lose. In doing such, he follows in the footsteps of  
Gordon Brown’s ambassador in Kabul who threatens “to stay for 30  
years” in an endless campaign of despair from which withdrawal is  
perceived as politically impossible. Thirty years for what?  A  
campaign to prop up an embattled, corrupt, unpopular puppet regime in  
Kabul, a task for which Britain and its NATO allies are terribly  
undermanned? No, but rather as  Jenkins points out to keep NATO alive  
in Europe. NATO’s agitated chief, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, certainly  
appears as a man fighting for his job. He should be as most Europeans  
see the Afghan conflict as wrong, immoral, America’s war, all about  
oil, and probably lost. For them NATO was created to deter the Soviet  
Union, not to supply foot soldiers to America’s wars in the Muslim  
world.

Most alarmingly, candidate Obama and others before him (including  
George W. Bush) crudely conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda when in  
fact, the two groups share very little and do not regard each other  
with high esteem.  The Taliban and Al Qaeda represent two very  
different entities. The former comprise an ethno-national phenomenon  
rooted in space, appealing then and now to a loosely aligned movement,  
largely of Pashtun Afghans. The Taliban have profound roots in parts  
of Afghanistan. They form only part of the disparate resistance to the  
U.S/NATO occupation (other parts being nationalists, those seeking  
revenge for injury to family, those involved in poppy cultivation who  
perceive the West as threatening their livelihoods, those frustrated  
with Karzai’s and the West’s failed promises, unemployed men, etc.).  
Al Qaeda, on the other hand, is a de-territorialized, stateless  
organization formed to wage violent jihad anywhere in the world  
against those deemed to be Islam’s enemies. From a group spatially  
located in Afghanistan during the Taliban era, Al Qaeda has  
transformed itself into a decentralized, floating coalition of  
militant groups united in jihad. But for candidate Obama a simple  
undefined enemy exists: a unified Al Qaeda and Taliban who will be  
crushed by a few more brigades of occupation soldiers, Global Hawks in  
the skies and a billion dollars annually. Obama’s informal adviser,  
Afghan scholar Barnett Rubin, has long been arguing that “the problem  
really is in neighboring Pakistan, where Taliban and Al Qaeda  
commanders lurk.”

Encouraging cross border air and ground attacks raises the ire of the  
fiercely independent Pashtun tribals in the borderlands and further  
isolates a weak, post-Musharef regime in Islamabad bent on its own  
independent course of action. Moreover, Pakistan has lost thousands of  
its troops in fighting in the tribal lands under Musharef. The recent  
killing of 11 Pakistani frontier soldiers by U.S. Hellfire misslies  
promises to be a harbinger of the future. The elected political  
leaders of Pakistan’s borderlands virulently oppose Obama’s  
unilaterialism, e.g., the wily governor of the North-West Province,  
Owais Ghani, spoke out forecefully against Obama’s hinting at U.S.  
incursions.

Pahstun nationalism is far cry from Al Qaeda’s world jihad. Indeed, a  
quite convincing case can be made that the best antidote to a  
resurgent Al Qaeda would be support for the Taliban. But such fine- 
tuning escapes candidate Obama and his entourage of former Clinton  
foreign policy advisers (e.g., Susan Rice, Anthony Lake, etc.) and of  
others adocating “nation-building.” Change? George W. Bush, John  
McCain and Barack Obama are united in advocating policies which cement  
an alliance between Al Qaeda and the Taliban. They all priviledge a  
military approach over a civilian one of negotiating.

On the “winnig hearts and minds” dimension, candiate Obama promises an  
extra $ 1 million annually to be spent mostly outside Kabul. The  
record of U.S. monies budgeted for Afghanistan is clear:

Table.  United States’ Budgeted Outlays for “Operation Enduring  
Freedom” by Fiscal Year (in $ billions)


	

Total
	

DOD & VA Medical
	

Foreign aid
	

Aid/Total

FY 2001-2
	

$ 20.8
	

20.0
	

0.8
	

3.8%

FY 2003
	

14.7
	

14.0
	

0.7
	

4.8%

FY 2004
	

14.5
	

12.4
	

2.2
	

15.1%

FY 2005
	

20.8
	

18.0
	

2.8
	

13.5%

FY 2006
	

19.0
	

17.9
	

1.1
	

5.8%

FY 2007
	

36.9
	

35.0
	

1.9
	

5.1%

FY 2008
	

36.5
	

34.5
	

2.0
	

5.5%

Sources: Wheeler (2007), op. cit. and Amy Belasco, The Cost of Iraq,  
Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11  
(Washington DC: Congressional Research Service Report for Congress,  
updated June 23, 2008): 18-19

But how will such U.S funds be brought to a countryside largely  
controlled by a hostile resistance? Many parts of Afghanistan most  
desirous of improving everyday living are simply off-limits to non- 
governmental organizations, let alone the U.S. Government. The US/NATO  
strategy of relying upon an ink blot of “aid” radiating out from 2-3  
dozen heavily fortified PRT bases and scores of U.S. forward operating  
bases is at best very limited. So in order to “secure” the countryside  
which will then be lavished with candidate Obama’s annual largesse of  
an extra billion dollars, the US/NATO needs to either bomb or take  
ground casualties, expel the resistance, and especially hold  
territory. Building another well or a school has little meaning in the  
Pashtun code of honor (Pashtunwali), but the killing of a family  
member demands revenge be taken against the perpetrator. Simon Jenkins  
has stressed that American, Canadian, British, Dutch and even Estonian  
troops (those brave “new Europeans” forming part of the “coalition” of  
the bribed )  simply snatch and hold towns for a while but are unable  
to command local loyalty. “They cannot hope to garrison every  
settlement.” Musa Qala retaken by the British with much fanfare is a  
typical case, a success which is a failure.

In other words, candidate Obama promises nothing other than what  
already is: more prolonged low-intensity conflict with endless death  
and destruction. If the U.S. military escalation of the past two years  
is any indication, a further escalation as he proposes will simply  
lead to more dead Afghan civilians, a countryiside and towns racked  
with the deadly explosions of IED’s and suicide bombers followed by  
the destruction unleashed by equally deadly close air support (CAS)  
strikes. A strong correlation exists during 2004-2007 between levels  
of U.S occupation soldiers in Afghanistan, tonnage of bombs dropped  
and numbers of dead and injured Afghans. Will the monetary value of  
dead Afghan remain about one-tenth that of an Alaskan sea otter? Will  
yet more CAS air strikes continue killing ten times more Afghan  
civilians per ton dropped than the numbers killed in Serbia in 1999?  
Why should an Obama future be different?

The candidate of change in Afghanistan? History has clearly shown it’s  
easy to invade and conquer Afghanistan but it’s terribly difficult to  
govern and exit honorably. Obama is no Mikhail Gorbachev who took  
Russia out of the Afghan fiasco when he realized what many Russian  
leaders had been too scared to admit in public - that Russia could not  
win the war and the cost of maintaining such a vast force in  
Afghanistan was crippling Russia's already weak economy. The cost of  
America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was $171 billion in FY2007 and  
an estimated $195 billion in FY2008.

Candidate Obama, his Clinton era advisers, and sadly all too many  
others fail to recognize a web of inter-connected, persistent  
constraints, or of given realties. One might label them as the “five  
cannots”:  US/NATO cannot send 400,000 combat troops to garrison  
Afghanistan’s towns, hamlets and countryside (which is a pre-condition  
for reconstruction to win hearts and minds ); the US/NATO cannot  
impose a powerful central government upon Afghanistan ; the US/NATO  
cannot neutralize the very effective least-cost weapons of choice of  
the Afghan resistance (IED’s and suicide bombers);  the US/NATO cannot  
seal the Afghan-Pakistan border and hence will not eliminate the vital  
sanctuary so necessary to a guerrilla movement); and lastly, the  
Pakistan government has never been able to dominate its vast tribal  
borderlands and there is no reason to believe such will change. Those  
who choose not to understand these “five cannots” advocate change in a  
vacuum. A military impasse begets a political solution.

The perceived poison of a foreign occupation, the rampant corruption,  
the all-too-frequent desecration of Islam by the occupiers, the sheer  
folly of the US/NATO seeking to extend the writ of a central  
government to the Pashtun tribal regions , the spiraling count of  
civilian deaths has shifted the Afghan struggle towards a war of  
national liberation.  Anatol Lieven of King’s College (London) puts it  
aptly. Afghanistan is

     Becoming a sort of surreal hunting estate, in which the U.S. and  
NATO breed the very terrorists they then track down.

Candidates Obama and McCain promise more of the same carnage packaged  
as change.

Marc Herold is an Associate Professor of Economic Development &  
Women's Studies at the University of New Hampshire. He can be reached  
at:
Marc.Herold at unh.edu

Notes.

Robert Scheer, “Obama on the Brink,” Truthdig.com (July 22, 2008) at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080722_obama_on_the_brink/

“Transcript of Interview on CNN” (July 25, 2008) at http://thepage.time.com/transcript-of-obama-interview-on-cnn/

Anthony H. Cordesman, “One War We Can Still Win,” International Herald  
Tribune (December 13, 2006) at http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/13/opinion/edcord.php

speech is reproduced on The Huffington Post (July 29, 2008) at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/15/obama-spokeswoman-hits-ba_n_112834.html

“Talking Sense on the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” International  
Herald Tribune (July 17, 2008) at http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=14574298

Mike Scheuer, “Why Doesn’t al-Qaeda Attack the US?” Antiwar.com (May  
29, 2008) at http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=12911

as pointed out by Tom Hayden, “Obama, Iraq and Afghanistan,” The  
Nation (July 15, 2008) at

Explored in Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, “No Sign until the  
Burst of Fire. Understanding the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier,”  
International Security 32, 4 (Spring 2008): 41-77

Patrick Buchanan, “Obama’s War,” Antiwar.com (July 29, 2008) at http://antiwar.com/pat/

Ann Marlowe, “Afghanistan Doesn’t Need a Surge,” Wall Street Journal  
(July 22, 2008) at http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB121668659664272147.html

Hayden (2008), op. cit.

Simon Jenkins, “A Bad Attack of Beau Geste Syndrome at Our Expense,”  
The Guardian (July 5, 2006) at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/jul/05/comment.afghanistan

Eric Margolis, “Why Europeans are not Eager to Die in Afghanistan,”  
LewRockwell.com (February 13, 2008) at http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis100.html

well argued in Mark Levine, “Obama and the Taliban,” Huffington Post  
(July 25, 2008) at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-levine/obama-and-the-taliban_b_114900.html

James Gordon Meek, “Afghanistan Experts Say John McCain and Barack  
Obama are Clueless,” New York Daily News (July 19, 2008)

Simon Jenkins, “Stop Killing the Talkiban – They Offer the Best Hope  
of Beating Al Qaeda,” The Times (June 22, 2008) at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_jenkins/article4187504.ece

as argued in Juan Cole, “Obama is Saying the Wrong Things About  
Afghanistan,” Salon.org (July 23, 2008) at  http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/07/23/obama/

an excellent discussion of Pashtunwali may be found in Hamida Ghafour,  
“Why NATO Misreads the Afghan Rulebook,” Globe and Mail (May 5, 2007)

Paul Gilfeather, “Coalition of the Bribed, Bullied & Blind,” The  
Mirror (March 22, 2003) at http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/views03/0323-07.htm

Jenkins, op. cit.

Sean Rayment, “In Afghanistan even our Successes are Failures,” The  
Telegraph (August 3, 2008) at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/08/03/do0306.xml

Belasco (2008), op. cit.: 18

Occupation forces Commander McNeill has said himself that according to  
the current counterterrorism doctrine, it would take 400,000 troops to  
pacify Afghanistan in the long term (from Ulrich Fichtner, “Why NATO  
Troops Can’t Deliver Peace in Afghanistan,” Der Spiegel (May 29, 2008)  
at http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,druck-556304,00.html

The umbrella organization ACBAR (Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan  
Relief) reported 463 insurgent attacks during May and 569 in June  
2008. Nineteen aid workers have been killed this year. The result has  
been greatly scaled back aid and relief efforts (“Record Afghan Unrest  
Hampering Aid NGOs,” Agence France Presse (August 1, 2008) at http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5h9LKPSwMVEzC25r7wQ4-XuOkz4sw 
  ).

see Johnson and Mason (2008), op. cit

As Gerard Chaliand, veteran geo-strategist of so-called asymmetrical  
wars, put it recently, “victory is impossible in Afghanistan…Today one  
must try to negotiate,” because the Taliban control much of the local  
power in the south and east of the country (Immanuel Wallerstein,  
“Afghanistan: Shoals Ahead for President Obama,” Middle East Online  
(August 1, 2008)).

Johnson and Mason (2008), op.cit: 54

Anatol Lieven, “The Dream of Afghan Democracy is Dead,” The Financial  
Times (June 11, 2008) at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f25de8f4-37b1-11dd-aabb-0000779fd2ac.html